A Review of the Popular and Scholarly Accounts of Donald Trump's White
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societies Review A Review of the Popular and Scholarly Accounts of Donald Trump’s White Working-Class Support in the 2016 US Presidential Election Jack Thompson Department of Politics and International Relations Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham NG1 4FQ, UK; [email protected] Received: 10 April 2019; Accepted: 9 May 2019; Published: 13 May 2019 Abstract: Popular and scholarly accounts of Trump’s ascendency to the presidency of the United States on the part of the American white working-class use different variables to define the sociodemographic group because there is no “working-class White” variable available in benchmark datasets for researchers to code. To address this need, the Author ran a multinomial regression to assess whether income, education and racial identity predict working-class membership among white Americans, finding that income and education are statistically significant predictors of working-class whiteness, while racial identity is not. Arriving at a robust definition of “white working-class” in light of these findings, the paper next turns to a review of the extant literature. By retrieving studies from searches of computerised databases, hand searches and authoritative texts, the review critically surmises the explanatory accounts of Trump’s victory. Discussion of the findings from the review is presented in three principal sections. The first section explains how working-class White communities, crippled by a dearth of social and geographic mobility, have been “left behind” by the political elites. The second section examines how white Americans, whose dominant group position is threatened by demographic change, voted for Trump because of resonance between his populist rhetoric and their latent “racist” attitudes. The third and final section explores the implications of a changing America for native-born whites, and how America’s increasing ethnoracial diversity is eroding relations between its dominant and nondominant groups. The Author surmises by arguing that these explanatory accounts must be understood in the context of this new empirical approximation of “working-class White”. Keywords: Trump; 2016 Election; White working-class 1. Introduction The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States in 2016 was a rather unusual case in that he was a candidate beyond the mainstream, widely seen as having little chance of winning power. Trump’s election connects with what scholars [1,2] contend is a “populist wave” enveloping our democracies. This wave represents a challenge to traditional centre-left/right mainstream political parties, as well as their political agendas and worldviews. Understanding Trump’s victory in this context is crucial as we need to understand what it represents. Trump’s success could be a one-off. Alternatively, it could be indicative of a new pattern of political behaviour in which U.S. voters are now reticent to the old offers of the political class. We need to make sense of the currents that created the conditions for Trump in light of these broader developments to see if his election is part of a broader trend. However, there is little-in-the-way of systematic analysis of who Trump’s supporters are that can help us contribute to debates about why he won. For example, oblique references to the “working-class” [3] are used. Authors also use pejoratives Societies 2019, 9, 36; doi:10.3390/soc9020036 www.mdpi.com/journal/societies Societies 2019, 9, 36 2 of 27 such as “hillbillies” [4] and “white trash” [5] to describe Trump’s base. Also, formulations such as “non-college-educated White” that emphasise the group’s statistical measurability are also commonly employed [6]. However, there is a singular term whose mention is markedly absent in enquires on Trump’s support that captures all of these derivations. This is the White working-class. There is a significant knowledge gap present within the extant body of literature. This is that there is no empirical approximation of the sociodemographic group that authors measure across studies. Without such a definition, we cannot address why White working-class voters coalesced around Trump in the 2016 election. This is important because we need to understand whether these factors relate to broader issues such as the rise of populist parties and increasing levels distrust towards elites in other Western democracies. Therefore, we first need to establish an empirical definition of the White working-class to explain how a billionaire from New York City became the figurehead for so many of them. After addressing this need in the first empirical section, The Author presents a comprehensive review of the body literature of literature that relates to Trump’s White working-class support. The review reveals three significant explanatory contexts regarding who the White working-class are, and why they supported Trump in the 2016 election. These are (i) the “left behind” narrative, (ii) the cultural decline thesis (iii) and the implications of changing America for native-born Whites. First, we begin with the “left behind” narrative. The review has found that numerous working-class ethnographies [3,4] argue that the White working-class lack upward social mobility. As a consequence, the White working-class have found themselves unable to move up into more affluent class strata and thus unable to realise the American dream. Likewise, rural white Americans are crippled by a lack of geographic mobility and are unable to migrate to find better opportunities elsewhere [7,8]. A dearth of both types of mobility leaves the group angry at the Washington elites for not improving their situations, leading them to vote for Trump as an act of defiance against the political class. The second significant explanatory context is the cultural decline thesis. Authors of this thesis frame the White working-class through a “dominant majority” ethnoracial paradigm [9]. They contend that America’s demographic and cultural change has eroded white American’s position as the “dominant group” in society. White Americans’ fear of losing the status afforded to them by their dominant position has been mobilised into a political cleavage. This makes the group receptive to political messages that stoke racial resentment and animus towards immigrants [10,11]. Increased support for Trump is thus correlated with resonance between his ethno-nationalist rhetoric and latent “racist” attitudes within the white working-class [12]. The cultural decline thesis implies that white Americans see themselves as an ethnoracial group and that this group identity has become a salient factor in their party politics and policy preferences [13]. However, authors of the cultural decline thesis only explore white Americans’ reactions to diversity, rather than looking at the effects of diversity itself on intra/intergroup relations. Consequently, the review explores a third significant explanation related to the implications of a changing America for native-born White Americans. Elucidating the history of nativist movements before the passage of landmark immigration legislation in 1965 indicates that Americans have long expressed uneasiness about new immigrants and still do today. Scholarly reactions against nativist thinking led to formulations of sociological theories of cultural assimilation [14]. More contemporary assimilation theories such as acculturation [15] explore the relationship between intergroup relations and increasing diversity in America today. Bringing together Berry’s [15] framework and the social capital/trust literature [16] highlights a troubling relationship between diversity and decreasing levels of intra/intergroup ethnoracial trust. This relationship is significant because it explains why native-born Whites are increasingly voting for right-wing populist actors such as Trump [17]. 2. Defining the White Working-Class Before we turn to the findings of the literature review, we must first address a pertinent knowledge gap within the extant body of literature. This is that there is no “White working-class” variable Societies 2019, 9, 36 3 of 27 for researchers to code. We need such a variable so that researchers are able to analyse the White working-class in the context of Trump’s victory. Part of the problem stems from the fact that “gold-standard” national benchmark survey’s such as the General Social Survey (GSS) and the American National Election Studies (ANES) do not contain a White working-class variable. Instead, the White working-class are defined by multiple independent variables across studies. This would make sense, given that class is a multidimensional construct. As will be apparent, this is reflected in the fact that author of the literature use variables of levels of income, educational attainment, as well as race, to define the sociodemographic group. The following section elucidates the three ways in which working-class whiteness is defined within the academic literature. Afterward, the Author speculates on the relative weight of these individual factors in the formulation of a working-class White variable by using multinomial logistic regression to model the determinates of working-class whiteness. 2.1. Context Trump made a clear play to the white working-class in the 2016 election. Such a move was recognised by Fessenden [18] in the run-up to Election Day. There was room for Trump to improve on Mitt Romney’s performance among white Americans in 2012. Some two million who had voted for John McCain in 2008 were ‘missing’ on Election Day 2012 [19]. Obama’s margin over Mitt Romney in the popular vote was ~5 million. However, the number of non-college-educated whites of voting age who did not vote was 24 million [20]. The question that remained was whether enough white-working-class Americans would turn out to elect Trump. Morgan and Lee [21] find that the white working-class did indeed compromise a large wedge of Trump’s base in the 2016 Election. Using self-report voter data from the American National Election Study (ANES), they observe that 28 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2016 had either voted for Obama in the 2012 Election or had not voted in 2012 [21] (p.